This Month's Installment
"A difficult fate. But in the end, what is this all, even devotion to the dearest property, against the loss of a person?"
He noticed that
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her thoughts were on her father. But he said nothing because he knew that she did not like to show her emotion, least of all next to him.
"You still have things to do to-day?" she askt. "In yet so late an hour?"
"I have a service to hold with the diaconal sisters in the city military hospital; they could not do it earlier."
"You have a lot of work now?"
He didn't answer.
"But the feeling to be able to give so richly in such a difficult time must carry you through everything - even through the sorrow."
Again he was silent.
They had reached the center of the city; the dusk crept over the streets; a few street lamps flickered on and threw their faint light on the pavement.
"There was a time," he said now, and a sound of bitterness was in his words, "when you thought differently about all that, where you judged my serious striving very insignificant and hurt me with it."
She lookt at him; the otherwise so calm look of her eyes had something shocked in it.
"I have - God knows - never thought so highly of my spiritual activity," he continued, "as you assumed it of me. Just now, as the war broke out, there were hours where I began to have doubts about everything that so far has constituted the substance of my life. Even now, I cannot deny it; these hours come again and fall upon me here like demonic powers. And yet - you were wrong back then."
She walkt next to him, possibly a little faster than previously, her head bowed to the ground so that in the dim lighting, he could see only a dark line of her profile.
Grammatical Minutiae/Commentary
The only translations I could find for
scheues ("einige Laternen flackerten auf und warfen ihr scheues Licht auf das Pflaster") were
shy,
timid, and
reserved, none of which really make sense in this context. I translated it as
faint.
